CC#27--Stop Chasing the Counterfeits & After 20 Years, A Heartfelt Thank You

Stop chasing the counterfeits. Let's talk about that next. On this Catholic Corner.

Welcome to the Theory to Action podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time, to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now here's your host, david Kaiser.

Hello, I am David and welcome back to another Catholic Corner. This will be a very different Catholic Corner, though. Normally the Catholic Corner we talk about is our humble attempt, which we started roughly a year ago, is to remind us to live our biblical worldview and to practice our faith, despite an ever increasing secular cultural suicide and certainly the end and the romance of Christendom. And as for the corner aspect of it, many of us Christians, and Catholic Christians at that, have been putting our faith and our values in the corner, so to speak, not speaking out about the things that matter to us and our faith, essentially putting our faith in the corner, as if it's a decorative piece only to be shared when people come over to the house or such, probably not walking the walk and sometimes not even talking the talk. Therefore, we started these Catholic Corner episodes to remind us to get our faith out of the corner, to live that faith, to talk about that faith humbly and to walk with our Lord, jesus Christ and people of all goodwill to make a better society here, but ultimately to be a people on a mission. That mission is to bring the good news of Jesus Christ to everyone with ears to hear and eyes to see. So today's podcast is to answer the question how did I grow in my faith, which one listener of this podcast asked me most recently, and to be humble about the whole thing, I answered I don't think I have. I think I have just hung around for a long time. But I am this month celebrating 20 years at my current parish and I think there's something to be said about that. It's a Dominican parish that I essentially grew up in and I matured into a Catholic adult in. I started in the parish at age 29 in 2003. I had come off of a very bad breakup with a girlfriend. At the time. I was searching for my soul. Essentially, I was searching for a foundation. I was brokenhearted. I was searching for the meaning of life. I was searching for the love to take me away from all the pain I was feeling, and I think or at least I think I know what some of you are feeling. Out there, there are many people, especially young people in particular, that have this notion that if you could just find a certain job or a certain spouse or a certain amount of money or a certain amount of likes on Facebook or Twitter or X or whatever we're calling it these days, if you could just make this certain rung on the ladder at your professional work, that everything, everything would be okay, everything would be at peace, everything would be grand, it would be rainbows and unicorns and happily ever after. Even as a mature adult approaching 50 years old and some, I guess, seven months, I went too humbly. Humbly, give you the advice to say stop it. Stop chasing the counterfeits. The counterfeit is my term for everything that is supposed to mean something but doesn't. Money is a counterfeit. Chasing money is a counterfeit. Once you gain a lot of money, you will find more ways to spend that money faster. Ask anybody who has a lot of money and we'll tell you the truth. Some people will lie to you and say it's perfectly wonderful, but most people, if they tell you the truth about money, they will tell you once you gain a lot of money, you will find more ways to just spend it faster. It is a counterfeit. Power is a counterfeit. Ask any leader if they feel more power by giving all their responsibilities in their position and the ones who you would actually trust to answer that question. They will tell you heck, no, they feel less power. They feel the weight, the tremendous weight that they carry around with their job for all the people that report to them. All the duties they have to take, all the decisions they have to make, they believe their job is a counterfeit. It doesn't bring any pleasure or betterment. Sex is another counterfeit. Sex in our hyper sexualized world these days, you would think that sex in all of its forms, even those that some of us might find repulsive, sex in all of its forms, would bring the most pleasure to anyone and everyone. But, as we're finding out these days, you can chase that rabbit down the rabbit hole and get all the sexual pleasure you want, but all that pleasure is fleeting. It barely lasts any time. It is a counterfeit. Drugs Drugs is a counterfeit. I don't know anything about this one, but everyone you have or I have asked who's ever worked with drug addicted people says that they feel more like a slave than anyone on the planet because of the addiction to drugs. That's another counterfeit. Alcohol I do know something about this. One Was never addicted to it but never made the best decisions when I drank alcohol. It too can make you a slave very, very quickly. It is another counterfeit. So all of these examples are just counterfeits. It's as if someone came up to you and gave you a hundred dollar bill and you would be somewhat excited and then you went to spend that hundred dollar bill and everywhere you went to every business, they would hold up that one hundred dollar bill to the light and see that it is a counterfeit. So all these counterfeits do not bring happiness. They claim to bring happiness but they never do, and that's our nugget of wisdom for today. So my story is your story. My lesson is your lesson Stop chasing counterfeits. As I approach 50 years old, that's the best advice I can give you Stop chasing counterfeits. We have all done this. I was coming out of a bad breakup, heartbroken, downtrodden, could have turned to any number of those counterfeits and did on some, but my parish, st Patrick's Catholic parish, was there. Now let me stop here and thank the Dominican friars, that minister to St Patrick's man. Since right before the Civil War, that parish was built and was opened and the Dominicans have been populating and fielding friars there, helping normal everyday people in their spiritual lives and, frankly, for their physical lives as well, for over the last 175 years. But for me, back in 2003, they picked me up, not one person in particular. It wasn't a one shot deal. But the sacraments picked me up, the drip by drip, the day by day, to me constantly showing up. The routine 7am mass was there for a lot of those early years. The sacrament of confession was there a lot too. And I will say this there is no greater service to Holy Mother Church than the Dominicans at least the province of St Joseph that we have there by them offering the daily mass at 11.45 every day throughout the week. And there's no greater service to the church than the offering of the sacrament of confession every day after that mass, from 12.15 until the line runs out. Until they are done, the Dominican friars will hear confessions until the line is done. That service, that dedication, that wonderful sacrament of healing, of spiritual direction, of being a good listener, to offer that to the people of God, that ability of our Lord, through the person of a priest, to help clean up his children that he created repeatedly from their falls, repeatedly from their sins, it's an overwhelming grace, inexplicable, an overwhelming sacrament. I could not have grown as much as I have over the last 20 years without that sacrament and without the Holy Mass, the spiritual direction offered during the sacrament of confession. In the space of a meager three to five minutes always means the world to me. A question or two posed and a very good theological, orthodox answers. That return is a wonderful help to this sinner who's still trying to make his way in the world and still trying to grow in the virtues each and every day. For me, I didn't grow up Catholic. I grew up in Catholic in name only, meaning we never attended Sunday Mass. I was never baptized as a child. I was never confirmed as a child. I was baptized and confirmed and given my first Holy Communion on the Easter vigil in 1998 in a Georgetown parish right outside Washington DC epiphany Catholic parish, which is on the east side of Georgetown, like I said, just outside DC, probably a meager two or three miles away from the White House, to give you some perspective. So essentially before 1998 and for the first 24 years of my life, I was essentially a pagan. So my finding St Patrick's in the fall of 2003 was a divine blessing, without question, and I wanna thank Father Dale Rosales, who mentioned when I was leaving Washington DC, and I should stop here Special shout out to Father Dale, father Dale along with Father Winthrop Brainard, who has passed on now. God rest his soul. Both Father Dale and Father Brainard helped to prepare me for my baptism, my first Holy Communion and my confirmation. So shout out to Father Dale, who I think is now in Chicago, if you're listening. Father Dale, a heartfelt thank you. God bless you. But Father Dale recommended for me to find the Dominicans if I could. When I told him that I was moving back to Columbus from Washington DC, where we had met, he said you should find a good Dominican parish. And boy did I find a very good one. It was a tremendous divine blessing. In addition to that blessing, if you fast forward a little bit, I was able to teach CCD, which is the Conferturity of Christian Doctrine, for five years at St Patrick's, from 2005 to 2010. That was a wonderful blessing and a wonderful grace. It forced me to really learn my faith. I was helping to teach high schoolers so grades nine through 12, and that exposure provided my own launching pad of discovery and learning and self-assessment and asking deeper questions of my faith, which only enriched my faith. But it truly was a forced march of learning the deep and rich Catholic faith. And let me tell you, high schoolers are no joke. You parents out there with high schoolers, you know. You know that they ask difficult and hard and tough questions. They ask deep and hard questions of all of us high school CCD teachers at the time. I remember having to prepare for every class as if it was an examination. Yes, there was a lesson to be taught, but, boy, they would come at you with different perspectives and they were very demanding and it was good. I think there was four of us teachers at the time for those five years. And it's certainly not like teaching the youngsters, the little ones you know they absorb the teachings, but no, the high schoolers, they'll laser beam you if you don't know your stuff and have the ability to articulate the faith. Now St Patrick's has a strong and growing and vibrant, traditionally minded Catholic parish. We take our faith seriously at the parish. I think all newcomers kind of understand that culture immediately when they see it for the first time. It's different than other parishes. Another blessing I would like to mention of being at a Dominican parish is you hear a lot of very good preaching and you hear a lot of devotion to the Catholic rosary. So for the last eight years of my life a blessing has been to pray the daily rosary almost every day of my life I tried to at least. Some days are good, some days are not so good, but it is a wonderful devotion that has helped me get through some of the toughest days of my life in the last eight years. Now most Catholic men are finally coming around to saying the daily rosary. But if you can't get to a Dominican parish which is what I would first recommend well, if you're in the province of St Joseph, I would wholeheartedly recommend it. They have. That St Joseph province prepares their Dominican friars very traditionally. They're very good, solid theological and orthodox teachings, because you certainly don't want to be learning from heretical priests teaching things that are certainly not Catholic. But back to the Holy Rosary. It is a wonderful blessing that most Catholic men should be saying the Rosary every day. There is some Catholic men that have this notion that the prayer or any prayer for that matter. I don't know where this comes from it's not manly. Now, that's just a lie from the pit of hell. It's beyond manly to pray, to pray each and every day. Our Lord was a man, a man in the flesh, and he prayed. He prayed every day. He told us to pray, so we as men must pray. This notion that manly men don't pray is hogwash, it's a lie. It's a lie from a culture that is dying. Now. To tag along with that, a good prayer devotion is to say the Holy Rosary. When the mother of our Lord, jesus Christ, asked us, at our Lady of Fatima, to pray the Rosary, we should do what our mother is asking of us be good sons to our mother and do as we are told. Now two more blessings I would like to offer in this short thank you podcast. It's first to the that man is you group at St Patrick's man. I don't know how to convey to you our listeners when genuine, authentic men get in a group and they are humble about it and they want to learn how to lead and how to serve a greater purpose than themselves and how to put in action their faith. When those three things intersect, there is just something that magical happens. And if you don't know what the that man is you group is, or if you're not Catholic, it's really hard to describe. Only to say it's a Catholic men's group that studies their faith each and every week with the help of traditional teachings from the church put out in video format to help us as men grow, and it's held at each parish. Well, the parish has to, you have to have a parish sponsor and then and then the group forms from there. And the beautiful thing with our group of men at St Patrick's is we have a large group anywhere from 8 to 20 show up every Saturday morning and it's after the 7 am mass and the number one thing and I've said this to them many times in the group and I'll share it here is that we are a humble group. We don't think we are the world's gift to Catholicism. We are not trying to be holier than thou. We are men struggling to live out our faith in the 21st century according to right teaching that Holy Mother Church has given us for the last 2000 years. It's a complex world out here. It is very confusing. There are many people claiming to teach the truth that don't have anywhere close to the inkling of the truth and that. That Manage you group for me has been a special blessing. It has been a group that you can bounce ideas off of, get a reaction. It's just a good, solid group of men that I think all men should have as good friends as part of their friendship circle. One specific example I can share when I had COVID back in September 2021, those guys from the that Manage you group. They were stepping up to help me. They were offering things like food or to go get medicine, or certainly offering prayers for me. They kept checking in on me and a man. You have no idea what that meant to me. You know I don't have a family per se. I still have my mom and my dad and my brother, so thanks be to God for that. But many of those guys do they have families. So for them to be thinking outside of themselves to try and help me still chokes me up to this day Now. I've been attending that Manage you since the earliest days of our parish, so I think for sure it was roughly about the fall of 2015. The reason I say that is because boy did we have some knockdown, drag out conversations. You know it was the run up to the 2016 election. We live in a polarized world. It's even more polarized within each camp, especially for the Republicans in 2016. That was the primary where Donald Trump and Ted Cruz went at it. I was a Ted Cruz guy. I had gone door to door for him all the way through the fall or the spring of 2015. So by the time we got to 2016, we were having some intense conversations internally in that group, and that's the beautiful thing. With the group, we would get off topic and talk politics, or we might talk a high state football, or we might even have our wonderful historian on staff, jack. He would interject with his traditional hand raising to ask a question as if we were still in school, and then he would come out of left field with some deep historical reference point that we should all consider and we would all laugh. But those personalities make the group the group. So I say all of this to tell you, if you are Catholic, if you don't have a that man as you group at your parish, just start one. It is a wonderful thing, it will help you to grow in your faith. And actually men from our parish have gone out to start, I think, some four or five new groups all over the country. In fact I joke that some of them that have left. I've told them we need to start a franchise model because we could reap the financial rewards of men that start with our group, find out how to run it, and then they move away and they start their own that man as you group elsewhere and it's up and thriving. I think there's one in Texas now, there's one in Florida, there's one in California, but I'm just kidding, I'm not kid, I'm just kidding. So no one light me up about the email with email about me wanting financial rewards. I was just joking. But a final blessing and I'm thankful for over the last 20 years as I've grown into maturity, has been my parents. Both of them are still living. Thanks be to God and praise be Jesus Christ. Mama 75 and dad is 84. Even though they are divorced, they have been there now for most of my life and that is a true God send. I was blessed to have two really good people, genuine, authentic people in the world, in the world that has turned upside down in the last 25 to 50 years, and I'm very thankful to have two such good parents, a mom and a dad, to show me right from wrong. Now I know I'm in the minority on that one. So I wanted to offer a heartfelt and sincere thank you to them both. They're in decent health both of them, and I'm very thankful for that. So in this thank you to my Dominican parish in my town, st Patrick's Again I want to thank you for all the time that you've spent in confession, helping me to sort out things, to help me to figure out the straight and narrow and to follow Christ by picking up my cross each and every day. I've been there for so many pastors over the years. It's hard to thank them all Father Echanger in my first years, then the very funny and hard-hearing Father Lacasse, then Father Michael Dosh and now Father Stephen Alcott special Thanks to Father Alcott. When I had COVID and I was really bad, father Alcott made a special trip out to my town home to give me the sacrament of anointing, the sacrament of the sick, and to hear my confession, which just meant the world to me. I was very, very thankful for that. So in today's very introspective Catholic Corner, unlike most of our podcast episodes, I Wanted to take some time to offer a sincere thank you To all of you who have made me who I am today. I Wanted to share with you From my perspective, approaching 50, that there's many counterfeits out there in life and there's one really solid thing you can build a firm foundation on, and that is God's love for you. Now that might sound hokey or pie in the sky, but I'm telling you there is a God and that God has a profound love for you yes, you. He created you. He wants what is best for you. He is going to teach you his will. He has taught his way of living and that way has been articulated and Preserved for 2,000 years of human history. It's a biblical worldview. I Would urge you to seek out that way of living, especially you young people. It is the most solid and concrete thing that you will encounter in this life. It is not a counterfeit. It will always be there. It is your foundation. It has been my foundation for the last 20 years and I'm still building that foundation. So I thank you again, most especially the Dominican order at St Patrick's, for those 20 years. There's 20 years that this month Began to take a young man like me who is very down in the dumps and depressed, and turned him around day by day With your steady administering of the sacraments, most especially of daily holy mass and the sacrament of confession. That day by day drip of grace from our Lord Jesus Christ has been for me the most special blessing that I have received since my day of baptism. So thank you for all the prayers from all the listeners and please know that I'm praying for you too. Most especially, thank you to St Patrick's for always being there, and God bless you all and keep fighting the good fight.

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